Big box retailer Walmart already sells everything from produce to furniture, as well as electronic devices. Some of its is even Walmart-exclusive hardware, like the relatively new OverPowered line of gaming PCs and gadgets and accessories sold under the Onn brand.
Now it looks like Walmart is getting ready to introduce two new Android tablets that will be sold as part of the Onn line of devices.
According to a report from Bloomberg the new tablets will be positioned as kid-friendly device, but there’s no word on the specs, price, or release date. Based on the information we’ve seen so far though, Bloomberg’s assertion that the new Onn tablets are iPad-competitors seems a bit off base.
It’s more likely that these will be low-cost tablets that more closely resemble the $50 models already on the market like the Amazon Fire 7Â line of devices or the B&N NOOK 7 tablet.
Two Onn tablets passed through the FCC website a few weeks ago, and both are included in Google’s latest list of devices with Google Play support.
So it seems pretty safe to assume that the 8 inch ONA19TB002 and 10.1 inch ONA19TB003 tablets should be available soon.
You can check out the user manuals, some photos, and some technical documents at the FCC website by clicking those links, by the way.
There aren’t a lot of details about the tablet specifications, but @MishaalRahman dug up some details indicating that the 8 inch model will have a 1280 x 800 pixel display, a MediaTek MT8163 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a microSD card reader, a micro USB port, and a 3,500 mAh battery and 5V/2A charger.
It has a mono speaker, a headphone jack, and front and rear cameras.
The most notable thing about the tablet is that it will ship with Android 9 Pie, which, as Rahman points out, would make it the first tablet from a company other than Samsung or Huawei to include the latest (stable) version of Google’s mobile operating system.
I haven’t seen detailed specs for the 10.1 inch model yet, aside from the fact that it seems to have stereo speakers (which means it has one more than the smaller model).
At the very least, I would hope it would also have a bigger battery and a higher-resolution display.
via Android Police
Do these tablets have microphones? Can you use Google Assistant with these devices?
I don’t get the reason why tablets usually TAKE features away from phones.
These are larger, heavier, less portable machines with little to no (logical) reason to remove features. I feel quite badly for OEMs and Google for allowing mediocrity (or even worse, low-quality) flood the market in terms of tablets and become the expected norm. That’s low-quality in terms of both hardware and software. It’s just a lot of e-waste.
Which is why, if you want a tablet, almost always stick with an iPad (as much as I dislike Apple). Going smaller, for phones, Android is regarded as the best option. And going larger, for laptops, Windows is regarded as the best option.
if someone manages to root these and put a custom recovery, I’ll be very interested in one. It would be nice to have something that plays back some of my new media files (I use hevc for the space savings) on the cheap.
In my opinion – the world does not need more cheap tablets. $50 tablets have terrible usability,
An 8″ tablet with 2 G of RAM probably isn’t a $50 tablet. The 8″ Amazon Fire with only 1.5 G of RAM is $80.
Walmart no doubt sees an opportunity to compete with Amazon on low-end devices. The advantage of this particular tablet seems to be the Android 9 as compared with the Fire OS based on an older version of Android that comes with the Amazon products.
I would agree round about $100 seems the ideal as above it gains are minimal a Fire 10″ is vastly better than a $35 Fire 7.